Annotation in Croquet

Our teams at Wisconsin and Minnesota have developed, implemented, and are now testing ways of creating annotations to objects by using pull-down and contextual menus in the Jasmine release of Croquet. Our earlier efforts to develop this capability were expended on the task of porting some of the work previously done by Yoshiki Ohshima from the Solar release of Croquet into the current Jasmine release. Now, we have something that is beginning to work pretty well in Jasmine.

Here's how it works: When you shift-click an object in Croquet, a pop-up contextual menu will appear at your present mouse location over the object being clicked. In the menu, there is an option to Create Annotation. By choosing this option, you'll be presented with a dialog asking you to enter text that you wish to have appear in your annotation.



Once you press the Create button, a window containing your annotation will appear and be linked by a green connector to the exact place you clicked on the original object.



The annotation window seen above is simply another object in Croquet. As such, it can be moved, edited or even be annotated with another annotation. This capability starts to be like that of a concept mapping application - and with some further modification, we'll have the beginnings of a pretty capable collaborative Croquet-based concept mapping application. Oh, and I should also mention that the annotations can be modified in place by multiple users.



Even more exciting is the idea that annotations need not be restricted to being text-based. Instead they may be other non-text objects, audio, or video based as is the case in the following screenshot:



Perhaps most interestingly, annotations can even be worlds in themselves!